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A fictional strategist’s logic for the continuation of hostilities in Eurasia/Eastasia:

“The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair.”

With confirmation from United States officials earlier this week thatan additional 4,000 troops will be sent to buttress the training and advisory mission in Afghanistan, one is forced to consider what to make of the state of affairs in that country. Frankly, it’s time the public started asking the hard questions, especially in light of Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne’s pledge that “[Australia] will always consider requests from the United States — our most important ally — for assistance”.

So what long-term national security interests are likely to be achieved by the US and its allies in Afghanistan in the future. Is the task to “defeat the Taliban” an impossible mission guided by a skewed sense of what the military can realistically accomplish? Is the current training mission “a bandaid for a bullet wound”, as one US combat advisor described it? A boulder to be rolled uphill by the military for all eternity, with an ever-so-slightly different campaign plan every four years?

According to Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, one of the chief architects of Donald Trump’s “new” strategy, the plan announced earlier this week draws on lessons learnt by the combat advisory teams who deployed alongside the Iraqi Army in the fight against Islamic State. The main takeaway, apparently, is that embedding Western military advisers with forward units is better than leaving them behind at base.

With a “frontline” emphasis for Trump’s campaign plan, you can see similarities to another “new” campaign plan recently outlined by Senator John McCain, who applauded Trump’s speech as a “big step in the right direction”. In his strategy, McCain argued that a “long-term, open-ended counter-terrorism partnership” with the Afghan government and the deployment of military adviser-trainers with the Afghan National Security and Defence Forces at the kandak (battalion) level instead of the higher corps level was the key to victory. What this means is that more troops are wanted to achieve a set of goals that a much larger force in 2011 could not achieve either.

To the uninitiated, a strategy that splits hairs over minutiae in mission structure instead of having a frank discussion about the mission’s fundamental problems might seem a little beside the point, especially when one considers that violence in Afghanistan derives less from non-desirable teacher-student ratios in US-Afghan training camps than it does from complex feuds over tribe and religion.

“There’s always more you can do — more advisers you can send, more capabilities you can develop for the Afghans,” says Dr Mike Martin, a Pashto-speaking former British army officer and research fellow at King’s College London.

“The Afghan government will take the support gladly because they would prefer that foreigners do the fighting for them. If you are an Afghan faction this is the game: get some foreigners to fight for you”.

Rather than being dragged into the conflict every time a new feud erupts between the Afghan government and its local enemies, Dr Martin argues, what is needed is simply a “minimum viable force” — the smallest possible training and support mission and a small counter-terrorism force — to keep the government afloat. This would prevent both mission creep and everybody’s worst case scenario — the fall of Kabul.

With such calls for minimalism seemingly sidelined in the President’s new strategy, however, the question that arises is what are an extra 4,000 troops going to do that the 100,000 deployed by President Obama in 2011 could not?

One begins to wonder if the emphasis on numbers and mission structure is a distraction from more basic problems looming in the background. Problems such as, say, the possibility that the Afghan National Security and Defence Forces might not be a viable fighting force without a permanent US military presence to buttress it.

The looming likelihood of a permanent war-footing for America in Afghanistan is worthy of consideration, not least because a core theme of Trump’s speech revolved around the idea that “conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy [from] now on”.

There’s a strong whiff of McMaster and Mattis in this phrasing because it’s indubitably correct that wars do not conform to neat timescales. It’s also true that this rhetoric can be interpreted as an attempt by Trump to distance himself from Mr Obama — a man strongly criticised for announcing his withdrawal timeline and giving the Taliban cause to “wait the US out”.

At the same time, even if Trump is right, that conditions instead of preferred timeframes should dictate decisions, it does nothing to allay the public’s concern that Afghanistan has become a case study in “endless war”.

But this is what makes the way Western governments formulate Afghanistan policy so frustrating. While a vague set of goals are well-known to the public — “disrupting and dismantling the neo-Taliban insurgency” or “denying sanctuary to jihadist groups” for example — never has a single campaign plan shown signs of permanently achieving any of these goals.

Preferred though they may be, they just don’t seem particularly achievable.

If jihadist ideology cannot be wholly eradicated on the Afghan-Pakistan border, is there a point at which we can call its outreach successfully contained? If “the Taliban” cannot be militarily defeated then at what point should other options be explored?

If Trump is good to his word that “perhaps it will be possible to have a political settlement that includes elements of the Taliban”, then what are the conditions in which this settlement could occur? At what point does the US President seek conflict termination over conflict perpetuation?

Trump needs to outline as clearly as possible by what quantifiable metrics his mission would be deemed a success. At present, we have none.

All in all, too many questions remain unanswered. With no tangible goals, no maximum spends and no body count cut-offs provided in Trump’s strategy-free strategy for Afghanistan, the public cannot but keep guessing how, when or even if Western military involvement in the country will come to an end. And that is exactly the problem.

A blow has been dealt to the prestige of Australia’s special forces with in-kind damages likely to follow for the reputation of the Australian Army as a whole.

At first, it might seem tempting to think of these kinds of events as isolated incidents that do not speak to a more widespread problem within the Army’s special operations community. But misconduct on the battlefield also speaks to a wayward shift in a military force’s broader operating culture.

Along with the Maywand District murders and the Panjywai massacre, what these new allegations levelled against Australian soldiers in Uruzgan will come to symbolise is the ultimate failure of Western militaries to adapt to a fight where the decisive battle was the human terrain.

According to our military leaders, the reason for Australia’s presence in Uruzgan province between 2001 and 2014 was to “clear, hold and build” a Taliban-free Afghanistan. Per counterinsurgency doctrine, by providing an enduring sense of physical security to local Afghans, the “hearts and minds” as well as the rifles and trigger-fingers of fighting-aged males in Uruzgan would eventually be won over.

At some point it seems that this strategic guidance either failed or was wholly ignored.

While Special Operations soldiers had earlier played a kind of “guardian angel” role in support of their regular counterparts in the Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force, as the Afghan war dragged on, that role became increasingly aggressive.

An upsurge in “direct action” operations began to distract from efforts to secure the population. By 2010, much of the task group was solely focused on so-called “high-value targeting” — the coalition’s effort to kill or capture an ever-growing list of local Taliban “commanders”.

As a former Special Operations Task Group member drily put it to me, the new penchant for fly-in fly-out missions conducted out the side of a Black Hawk saw the entire concept of operations switch from “clear, hold and build” to “land, kill and leave”.

Of course, operating in this manner was never going to defeat the Taliban. Insurgencies are complex adaptive systems capable of surviving the deaths of leaders. As David Kilcullen writes in Counterinsurgency: “decapitation has rarely succeeded [and] with good reason — efforts to kill or capture insurgent leaders inject energy into the system by generating grievances and causing disparate groups to coalesce”.

All this considered then, by channelling an apparent “shoot first, never ask questions at all” ethos, there’s a good argument to be made that much of SOTG’s work in the final years of the Afghan War was counter-productive.

In many ways, the sunset years of operations in Afghanistan marked a transitional moment in the Australian way of war — one which saw our special forces transformed into the hyper-conventional juggernaut it has become today.

In other Western forces, the over-emphasis on “conventionalised”operations — that is heavy-hitting operations which deviate from the subtle and indirect approach of yesteryear — has had similar results on the ground.

Despite more than a decade and a half of sustained military effort, today Taliban and other extremist groups cover as much as 40 per cent of the country.

Certainly, where our own efforts are concerned, the data is clear. Australia’s war in Afghanistan was a failure. According to the Institute for the Study of War, districts like Shah Wali Kot (where Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith’s VC-winning charge took place) are now categorised as “high confidence Taliban support zones”.

More than anything, what these new revelations demonstrate is that somewhere along the way our military, and our special forces in particular, simply lost the ability to effectively counter an insurgency.

Once upon a time, “the best of the best” were trained to operate like “phantoms” — treading lightly and prudently alongside their local partners.

Today, however, the legacy they will leave behind in the minds of Afghans will be a brutal one. The civilian cost of the Special Operations Task Group’s operations in Afghanistan is now apparent for all to see.

While the term itself suffers from a terminal case of jargonitis (in part because praxis is an import word from ancient Greek and in part because praxis is also the German for “practice” which has a separate meaning in English-language anthropology), the spirit of the praxis concept is as follows: there exists a process which connects the things people think about with the things people do and that mapping this contemplation-action algorithm is key to understanding how a member of a particular cultural group is likely to think and behave under a given set of conditions.

There is a huge body of theoretical muck out there to wade through in one’s search for a definition of praxis (from experience, this can actually lead to a reduced understanding of the concept) but since praxis, like anthropological fieldwork itself, is practically-oriented (or indeed, praxically-oriented) a good way to grapple with the concept can be found by thinking about a religion like Islam not only as a “practice” (that is, something someone does) but also as a “process” (the contemplative and active steps which lead to the doing). By reflecting on the process by which religious texts like the Qur’an (a body of work that contains various theoria) are interpreted and then incorporated into the daily lives of individuals, for example, one can observe the praxis concept in the field.

As a student of Islamic societies, the process by which the Quran is brought into the material world is the textbook example of the praxical process. Similarly, if one looks at a political project like “Marxism” – which Antonio Gramsci called “the philosophy of praxis” in his Prison Notebooks –one can observe an analogous process (that is, a revolutionary strategy) by which a utopian ideal is interpreted and then progressively introduced into society by the Marxist. Both the Marxist revolutionary process and Quranic exegesis-enactment (as a hermeneutic process) therefore, are examples of “praxis in the wild”.

With praxis thus defined and with the title of this post suggesting that there is something lacking in how “Islam” is dissected and studied in public discourse, it is now incumbent upon us to consider how the praxis concept might improve the way we think about Islam, re-injecting some intellectual rigor into the discussion.

As I’ve discussed previously, the “true meaning” of any text (especially a religious text) is ultimately interpretive. This should be self-evident to anyone who studied “the novel” in high school – especially if one’s English teacher was intent on extruding bizarre, hidden meanings from the most innocuous of sentences. Certainly, the fact that deciphering a text is an interpretive process (a praxis) should be self-evident to anyone who is familiar with the way in which a nation’s laws are interpreted by the courts.

As Barack Obama said of the US Constitution in his final address as President: “it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power – with our participation, and the choices we make.”

The “participation and choices” which Obama speaks of is, in this instance, a description of constitutional praxis – the process by which the law is interpreted, reflected upon, incorporated and then lived by “We the People”.

To Islamic scholars, the praxis concept is encapsulated by a process called ijtihad – the mental and physical effort which connects the Muslim vida contemplativa with the vida activa (to revisit Arendt). Ijtihad therefore, is the process (thus the praxis) by which interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence are developed. It follows then, that because jurisprudential interpretation is ultimately subjective, sharia (the legal aspect of Islam) cannot be thought of as comprising a single codex. Indeed, much as constitutional opinion amongst American jurists is not, in any way, unitary, “Islamic law” cannot be understood as a monolithic bloc that regulates Muslim behaviour in any single way.

For this reason – that is, because the ijtihad process produces many different interpretations of both sharia and Islam itself, it is uniquely artless to paint a literal “broad church” of thought with such a broad brush stroke. Likewise and for the very same reason, it is equally artless for one to imply that ISIS’ worldview has “nothing to do with Islam” (this position is often labelled an “apologist” position – often by those who themselves detest the label “Islamophobic”).

Having said that, I suspect that there are very few serious scholars of Islam who would claim that Islamist extremism has “nothing to do with Islam”. As both Shadi Hamid and Reza Aslan (two very popular scholars of Islam) have argued – it’s not that ISIS’ ideology is “not Islamic” per se (because the very nebulous nature of religious praxis means that if one says it is Islamic then it is Islamic) but rather that using ISIS as a case study to inform a generalization about what it means to be a Muslim is inaccurate and unfair to the majority of Muslims around the world. As such, despite the shrill cries ringing out from the far-reaches of the internet that terrorist-sympathising “snowflake apologists” are amassing in their “safe spaces” to measure just how little of nothing terrorism has to do with Islam, I’m yet to come across any serious peer-reviewed research that would reject that members of ISIS self-identify as Muslim. The critique, therefore, is probably a straw-man argument.

In many ways then, the greatest intellectual failure of “the anti-Islam school” (that is,the school formerly known as “Islamophobic” ), lies not in its interpretation of Islamic text per se but rather in its refusal to include a discussion of praxis into how Islam is actually lived – that is, the inability to see Islam not merely as a set of practices but also as a process by which the practitioner interprets text and engages with the sacred.

Certainly, it is possible that one could conclude that the Qur’an is intrinsically violent or misogynistic if one selectively read (as ISIS does) verses like 9:5 or 4:34 to the exclusion of contradicting verses like 109:6and 30:21(even though, as the anti-Islam school will tell you, later-occurring verses are supposed to abrogate earlier verses). Yes, if you read the Qur’an like that you might find “Islam [monolithic]” guilty of many crimes.

Ultimately, the bottom line is this: giving credence to the praxis concept is absolutely critical to the study of Islam [not monolithic]. Moreover, if one actually goes out on the streets and talks to Muslims about how they interpret the Qur’an and how that interpretation influences their behaviour (note: this requires interacting with a sample size that is larger than the cellblock of Camp X-Ray or the mullet-wearing Lebanese teenagers hanging out in hotted-up cars down the road), one would probably conclude that diversity of opinion in a religious congregation which comprises more than a fifth of the world’s population might well be infinite; that praxis is really the only thing that counts when crafting generalisations about “Muslims”; and that ultimately, the Qur’an (whether it is the word of God) is simply a collection of words recorded on a sheaf of palm-fronds. To borrow again from Obama, the Qur’an exists but it is up to Muslims through their “participation and choices” to interpret it and live it.

It might seem bizarre that a religion which scientifically regulates its phases of worship according to incremental changes in the lunar cycle could have so much diversity of thought. Here though, it’s worth noting that, according to hadith, the notion of ikhtilaf (Arabic: إختلاف) meaning “difference” or “diversity” was seen as a blessing by Muhammad. Indeed, according to a comprehensive study of the subject by Musawa, ikhtilaf al-fuqaha (“diversity of opinion amongst jurists”) not only existed as far back as the Abbasid Caliphate but was also respected as a necessary part of realising a truer, greater Islam.

A non-Muslim interested in thinking more about praxis might consider his own practices, and the contemplation-action algorithm that led him there. If, for example, one ascribes to the Christian faith and goes to church every Sunday, consider the following passage in Matthew 6:4-6:6.

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

After reading this passage, would it be fair to say that conducting the commonly-practiced Sunday ritual at church is “un-Christian”? The answer, of course, is “no”. Of sole importance here, beyond your self-identification as a “Christian”, is the praxis which underpins the religious choices you have made. In the end, the process of selecting the Sunday ritual and participating in the ritual itself, is the only bit that matters.

The images coming out of Nice are shocking. Bodies crushed beneath the multi-tonned might of a truck. Revellers who just minutes before were celebrating the festivities of France’s Bastille Day mowed down in the street. Corpses everywhere. People fleeing, running for their lives. All of it live-streamed by the ubiquitous smart-phone.

This terrorist attack (if that is indeed what this was) did not occur in isolation. In preceding weeks we have witnessed similar scenes of carnage in other great cities of the world – Istanbul, Medina, Dhaka and Baghdad. Terrorism is not new to us. But this attack is particularly frightening for two reasons.

At a visceral level, the mangled bodies on the promenade remind us of the human cost of terrorism in a way which even the vaporised nothingness which follows a suicide bombing can fail to convey. The mashed bodies are the bodies of actual recognisable people. The Horror, in the sense which Conrad meant it, is real.

Secondly, and perhaps most frighteningly, the use of an everyday vehicle as the primary weapon in a terrorist attack shows us that despite our best efforts to catalogue and trace the purchases of fertiliser at hardware stores; strictly control the dissemination of firearms and ban pen-knives on planes; we can never fully contain the threat posed by violent extremists. Preventing access to the means by which this violence is perpetrated is crucial but we should be under no illusions – we will never completely eradicate terrorism.

Reactionary voices will come forward saying that a ban on Muslim immigration is the solution to terrorism and Donald Trump will inevitably tweet, as he has tweeted before, that “I alone can solve” (the problem). But make no mistake – no border, no pogrom, no government-funded de-radicalisation program will ever be able to negate the possibility, however infinitesimal, that a madman will slip into the driver’s seat of a legally-purchased, road-worthy truck and run down dozens of innocent people in the street.

The perpetrators of these attacks plan and execute them with specific objectives, that is, a “desired end-state”, in mind. The political function of a terrorist attack is to incite fear in a population and if the scenes of chaos in Nice are anything to go by, IS has achieved this end-state. “Nous sommes terrifiés,” tweeted the Mayor of Nice, begging the Niçois to remain indoors. The city is in a state of panic. At a global level, the terrorists are celebrating further because we, like the Niçois, are afraid as well – afraid that we will be the victims of the next terrorist attack.

But while the terrorists’ coup in Nice and the marked increase in terrorist attacks should give us all cause for concern, we should not confuse “an increase in terrorist attacks committed by the Islamic State” (assuming IS is responsible) with a statement like “the Islamic State is winning”.

Indeed, if we use Mao Zedong’s 3-phased guerrilla war as a model for a successful fight we can see that the last year has been disastrous for IS – a year which has seen it regress from “Phase 3” (wherein the guerrilla army, as in 2014, begins the decisive annexation of enemy territory) back to “Phase 2” – the use of intimidation tactics like terrorist attacks to weaken the enemy’s resolve.

One-by-one its fighters in Iraq and Syria are being picked off. Just yesterday in a demonstration of the effectiveness of US airpower, Omar Al-Shishani, the Georgian-born commander of the Caliphate’s North and heartthrob of ISIS’ mujahireen (foreign fighters) was obliterated by a laser-guided GBU-12. Indeed, according to some in the online #ISfanclub, it is yesterday’s loss of Al-Shishani which inspired this new attack in Nice. Thus we arrive at the following conclusion. Outgunned, on the run and lacking the means with which to commit atrocities, ISIS has now resorted to running innocent people over with trucks.

In real terms, as I tweeted just yesterday, ISIS is in a bad place. If current trends in Iraq and Syria continue, my guess is that ISIS will be militarily defeated by this time next year. On the conventional battlefield, they are done. The terrorist attacks however, will likely continue as ISIS reverts to “Phase 2” tactics. In kind, we should prepare ourselves for the next battle – to make sense of and systematically defeat the ideology of salafi-jihadism. This will take time. And patience. But we should be confident about our ultimate victory. Yes, we know now that a truck can be used by this enemy for indiscriminate violence. The prospect truly is terrifying. But as Omar Al-Shishani learned yesterday, 230kg of ordnance (when used selectively), and a patient, cerebral approach is far more effective.

The Arabic word for “Islam” on the right. Inverted into the shape of a Kalashnikov in the thought bubble. Source: Jabertoon

Radical (chemistry): “A molecule that contains at least one unpaired electron… because of their odd electrons, free radicals are usually highly reactive… they [can] react with intact molecules, generating new free radicals in the process”(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015)

If it can be said that free radicals in chemistry are good at creating more free radicals or that political radicals have a tendency to replicate and create revolutions then it is also a rule of Twitter that anything the popular neuroscientist Sam Harris says about Islam and Islamism will be liked, retweeted and defended by his legions of fans. The Law states if it is he that created it, then the Tweet will be spread, regardless of any discrepancies or oddities in the Tweet’s molecular structure.

Such was the case with Harris’ online rebuttal against the terminology used by Hilary Clinton in her response to the Orlando shooting – 691 retweets, 1,866 “favourites”.

Here Harris sought to chide Clinton for her use of pleonasms, arguing that the excessive use of the adjective “radical” made her terminology linguistically redundant. In many ways, Harris is right to focus on language. Phraseology is important in the discussion of jihadist violence. “If Hilary is only against the radical jihadists,” an onlooker might otherwise wonder. “What about the mainstream jihadists? Are they OK then?”

At this point in Trump’s over-televised run for Presidency, everyone who isn’t living under a rock should be aware that there is no such thing as a “mainstream jihadist” but the larger point Harris is trying to make is still valid – terminology is important and informed debate begins with the correct use of language.

Not being one to shirk the opportunity to nitpick however, I offered that although the term “radical jihadism” is a redundant pleonasm (much as the term “redundant pleonasm” is itself a pleonasm) the term “radical Islamism” is acceptable to use since there are many different schools of Islamist thought. This includes what we might call “mainstream” and “radical” forms of Islamism.

Harris’ suggestion, of course, is that theocracy – as a system of government wherein all authority is derived from a deity – has some kind of innate quality which makes it “radical” and that because of this quality it is therefore redundant to affix the adjective “radical” to the word “Islamism” (since the central aim of most Islamists is the establishment of an Islamic theocracy).

As awful as theocracies are, one runs into problems by blanket-labeling an entire system of government as “radical” – even one as flawed as theocracy. If theocratic ideas were necessarily radical what would one then make of a country whose Pledge of Allegiance is a pledge to “one Nation, under God”? Or what would one make of the Vatican – a religious theocracy run by priests? Would one really argue that the Pope and his cabal of cardinals are nothing but “a bunch of radicals”? One could argue that I suppose but it would be a very radical argument to make indeed. And there would be a great many Catholics in the American mainstream (citizens of “one Nation, under God”) who would disagree with your position.

It is clear then that the word “radical” has an inherently relative quality and that it is better understood simply as “that which is not mainstream”. Contiguously, the term “radicalism” refers simply to a collection of political beliefs which do not exist in the mainstream. It is merely the antonym of the humdrum middle-ground.

The distinction I was trying to make between what we might call “radical Islamism” and the less radical (but no less repugnant) forms of Islamism essentially coheres with the same distinction made previously by political philosopher Olivier Roy. Roy’s thesis was that Islamism is not one single movement but a spectrum of political beliefs which “oscillates between two poles” – a “revolutionary pole” and a “reformist pole”. The distinction should seem fairly self-evident to anyone with even a cursory understanding of the history of political Islam. Some radical Islamists (who we typically refer to as jihadists today) want to pick up a sword and accelerate Islamisation with cold steel while others in the mainstream are more relaxed (Jacob Olidortand Graeme Wood calls these relaxed types “quietist”) – seeking to focus their efforts on Islamising society “from the bottom up, bringing about, ipso facto, the advent of an Islamic State”.

The distinction between Roy’s “revolutionary” Islamists (who we can safely call the “radicals” among the Islamists) and “reformist” Islamists should be familiar to Harris because Maajid Nawaz made a very similar distinction in the book they co-authored together:

“…When I say ‘Islamism’ I mean the desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam on society. When I say ‘jihadism’ I mean the use of force to spread Islamism.” (Nawaz/Harris 2016)

Thus, given what we have discussed about the different forms of Islamism we arrive at the following diagram which expresses the fact that Islamism is not unitary but oscillates between “mainstream” and “radical” poles.

Fig 1.1

The “pollination line” in Fig 1.1 is used to demarcate the point at which Islam ceases to be simply “one’s religion” and becomes a political ideology – the point at which the believer pollinates the spiritual life with “the world of the profane“. In essence, the pollination line delineates what we in the West might call “the separation of church and state”. My specific use of the term “pollination” is intentional here, having borrowed it from a controversial hadith narrated by Anas which offers a glimpse of a secular Islamic world in which worldly affairs are separated from spiritual ones (see footnote below)***.

One will note in the mere existence of this diagram, that I have taken care in how I approach the subject of Islamism, viewing it less as a monolithic bloc (as Harris and Trump have now come to view Islam itself) but treating it as a highly complex collection of diverse social and political movements (all of them seriously flawed).

Indeed, if one were to borrow from the political theorist David Nolan and rework my diagram by including another ideological vector like “primacy of the tribe vs primacy of the Caliphate”, one could plot the significant ideological differences between the various Islamist groups with significantly more accuracy on a Cartesian chart.

As with the following:

Fig 1.2 (Noting that Boko Haram’s ideology is nearly unplottable)

Indeed, once we realise that the issue of Islamism is far greater in scope than the white Muslim convert next door regurgitating the filth he reads on the Internet (that is, once we remove ourselves whole-bodily from the ethnocentrism of our own backyard) we will realise that Islamism, just like Islam itself, is very far from a single creed.

Ultimately, the most succinct way I could put the distinction between “the various Islamisms” was by pointing out that in some Muslim-majority countries (like Egypt) there are some Islamists who almost everyone would regard as a terroristand others who would be democratically elected.

@AtheistSensei@Joe1West Put it this way. Do you think there should be a distinction between Morsi and Baghdadi? Both are Islamists.

Naturally, by simply pointing out that Islamist views are fairly mainstream in many Muslim majority countries (which they are) I was likened to an ISIS sympathizer by the Harris fan club. According to my logic, they claimed, ISIS’ ideology shouldn’t be considered radical because within the Islamic State, ISIS’ worldview is the prevailing worldview.

Ad hominem aside, it’s actually a reasonable point to make. Hypothetically, if researchers were able to obtain unbiased psephological data from within the Islamic State or if we reduced the sample size of our “spectrum of political belief” diagram (Fig 1.1) to say, fighting aged males currently residing in the city of Raqqa, we would likely find that ISIS’ worldview is far from radical. One might even observe “the pollination line” shifting completely to the right indicating that everyone is in total agreement that Islam should be indivisible from the affairs of state (although if we use my Cartesian model, one would plot the Anbar tribes on a higher co-ordinate to the ISIS muhajireen on the “primacy of the tribe” vector).

Of course (returning to Harris’ original critique), we know that when Hilary Clinton is talking about trends in contemporary politics she is not restricting her sample size to fighting aged males in Raqqa. So the point is moot – ISIS’ worldview is indeed objectively radical in this context. In saying this, I will concede (to the glee of Sam Harris’ fan club) that if the sample size for this discussion was restricted to the US (which it may have been since Clinton was talking about Orlando) then yes, Islamism should be considered a radical ideology. This would mean that Harris is right and the term “radical Islamism” uses a redundant adjective (shame! O shame on you Hilary!). But if we can leave ethnocentrism out of our thinking for a moment and think of this “war of ideas” as a global war and the entire world (with its 50 Muslim-majority countries) as our sample size than it makes sense to make distinctions between different kinds of Islamist belief. Clinton has served as America’s top diplomat so I would hope that she was thinking big picture on this issue.

While I’m on the topic of making concessions to the Harris fan club, I’ll also concede that all Islamists (“quietist” or not) are in a sense “radical” in that an Islamist seeks to be an agent of radical change to society – transforming it completely. There is very little “moderation” in all Islamist ideation which is why many Islamists end up becoming “extremists” (the antonym of “moderation”). But to repeat the hundred and something year old quote at the top of this article: “radicalism is characterized less by its principles than by the manner of their application”.

Heaving ho then, while we could continue discussing whether “radical Islamism” constitutes a pleonasm, the key point is that if we can’t make simple distinctions between the ideation systems of someone like Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (a militant jihadist, whom I would label a radical Islamist) and someone like Mohammed Morsi (an Islamist whose views, according to the results of the Egyptian vote in 2012, are fairly mainstream in Egypt) then there really is no hope for our ability to understand the place of Islam in our world.

Of course, Harris’ thesis (the one that is retweeted by his legions of fans… and then repackaged in less savoury terms by Trump™) is that the world’s “Muzz-lims” should be considered followers of an intrinsically radical religion – Islam being what is – a religion founded by a puritanical Bedouin raider.

While the latter about Mohammed might be true, the reality is that in the world we live in today – a world which the founder of Islam was integral in shaping (for better or for worse) – the Islamic worldview and even the Islamist worldview is far from a “radical” one.

This is not to say that one should not speak out against Islamism (as Harris’ fan club seems to think I am suggesting). On the contrary, given all the empirical evidence which suggests that mixing religion and politics is about as good an idea as mixing sleeping pills and alcohol, I’ll be the first to speak out against Islamism if it ever becomes a mainstream belief in Canada (thankfully, an Islamist would be considered a radical in my neighbourhood). I’ll also happily speak out against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, Saudi Arabia’s harsh dispensation of judicial punishment and the reign of theocracy in Iran.

But if we can agree that “Islamism” is the “enemy” (to use a term which others with military backgrounds can relate to) then our first duty in this global war of political ideas is to understand this enemy as best we can. One need not repeat the Sun Tzu edict here for emphasis.

Understanding this enemy involves conducting what military planners call a “stakeholder analysis” – mapping out all the individual actors within the conflict eco-system to grasp the role they play in producing and transforming violence. This mapping exercise might involve building a profile of each of these individual actors, and occasionally, categorising them according to where their views might lie on a spectrum of political belief (as we have done in Fig 1.2).

Understanding and making the distinction between what we might call “mainstream” Islamists (the quietist types) and “radical” Islamists (the jihadists) is important here because it enables us to adjust the parameters of our targeting apparatus within the system. This enables us to focus our efforts on the targets that matter the most. Indeed, if we remember that labor is in short supply, our aim should always be to attack targets who, once removed from the system, will have a significant effect on the enemy’s centre of gravity. A “radical” Islamist is good at creating more “radical” Islamists, just as in chemistry a radical molecule is good at creating more radical molecules. Therefore, it follows, we need to have words which enable us to categorise and identify radical Islamists where they exist.

Remembering that our ultimate aim in this war is to move that pollination line in Fig 1.1 as far over to the left as we possibly can, the greater problem – the problem of Islamist violence in our world – is greater than the debate over terminology. Ultimately however, our ability to solve the problem rests on our ability to understand the problem and if we can’t understand the basic terminology and the importance of making basic distinctions between the different forms of Islamism then we’ll never find a solution.

By now it should be obvious that the application of brute force, by itself, is insufficient in the effort to defeat jihadism.Similarly, while state intelligence organs have proven effective at disrupting threats to domestic security and adding new names to shiny-white balls in the drone strike lottery, the jihadist problem still persists. It persists. And it persists because we have failed to apprehend the nature of problem.

Nope, sorry Akhmal, it’s neither

In more ways than one, this non-apprehension stems from our tendency to glean information through computer screens instead of through people – a symptom of our preference for technologism (as exemplified by the “death from above” problem-solution continuum) instead of humanism (an in-depth understanding of old mate Akhmal and his problems). As a result, and in light of the fact that jihadist terrorism is much worse (by several orders of magnitude) then it was even five years ago, it seems that we still don’t know why cultural facts on the ground in faraway places are manifesting as effects elsewhere.

Indeed, what our misadventures attempting to defeat insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated is that our inability to understand the cultural environments in which we operate renders instantly useless any and all efforts we might make as counter-insurgents.

In this war, knowing who to kill can be less important than knowing who not to kill. A given target on the Joint Prioritized Effects List might yield indices of “1” on a threat association matrix but that same target might also be a swing-voting imam, siding with the jihadists not because of any ideological affinity he has with them but because he is engaging in a survival maximisation strategy– collaborating out of necessity.

If we had only known this before we droned him into oblivion, we might have slipped him a few greenbacks, done his speech-writing for him and used his sermons against the bad guys.

By contrast, the current industrial killing machine approach, as exemplified by the upthrust in direct action raids conducted by JSOC et al, has yielded limited results cohering with Stan McChrystal’s characterisation of “insurgent algebra” as “ten minus two [insurgents] equals twenty, or more, rather than eight (10-2≥20)”.

In many ways then, the logic for being better-informed (and perhaps more selective) in our bomb-dropping is numerical – we have a limited amount of ordnance to fire at any given location and we know we can’t and don’t want to kill everybody in that location because our desired end-state is neither genocidal nor Sisyphean. Ergo, it follows that we need to be better informed. But we cannot be better informed until we go and get informed.

Likewise with the view that aid dispensation is a cover-all panacea, we cannot expect the mere building of infrastructure in Afghanistan’s mountainous “land of unrestraint” (yaghistan) to capture the hearts and minds of a tribal population who have a culturally-engrained suspicion of cities (shahr) .

Neither can we expect the Sunni of Anbar to fight for us “out of gratitude” for the armed social work we once conducted in the past. “Hearts” (and well-building) can be valuable to us, yes. But hearts are not nearly as valuable as minds. Furthermore, without observing and understanding the “cultural mind” that is driving the phenomenon of militant jihadism, as it is occurring on the ground, the best strategy we will ever be able to hope for in our hopeless war of attrition is two 5.56mm in the heart and one in the mind.

It is clear then that what is required to defeat jihadism is a detailed, even ethnographic, understanding of any future terrain where this ideological conflict is likely to take place. It is not enough to simply draw causal links between jihadism and incorporeal factors like “grievances”. Nor is it enough to attribute the blame for jihadist recruitment on vaguely-defined ontological states like “poverty” or vaguely-described “charismatic recruiters” and “madrassas”.

Further questions need to be asked by people involved in field research. What are these “grievances”? Where did they come from? What is the nature of local “poverty”? If there are “charismatic recruiters” in Saudi-funded madrassas on the AfPak border, which ones in particular are churning out the bad guys? Why these ones? What is the cultural terrain in which these “bad madrassas” are ensconced? In short, what are the “roots” of the so-called “roots of terrorism”?

“Right, but before we blew up your school did you like to go?” (Source: Sunnyinkabul.com)

Up to now, we have largely relied on arcane computer-plotted metrics like “significant kinetic effects” to tell us what the violence looks like rather than walking around, talking to people and finding out what the violence is actually doing. By relying on the quantitative data we are missing out on the qualitative description – the somatic inputs which inform us about the totality of cultural life and the dispositions and allegiances of the people.

The Practitioners

As far as seeking to better understand the problem, the US Army Human Terrain Systemrepresented a step in the direction. But it was a dismal failure. Putting uniforms on social scientists and asking them to “do anthropology” in the context of a military operation-cum-occupation is laughable. One can not be a “participant-observer” if one is dressed like Terminator in a town where the favoured dresscode is a kaftan or a dashiki.

Once the boots are on the ground stamping out a big footprint, it may actually be too late for anthropologists to do traditional ethnography. Indeed, if Iraq is anything to go by, it may be too late to do anything at all (2017 update: I take that back. Send in the anthropologists to survey the mess in Mosul and Raqqa).

This century has seen the US leading the ham-fisted fight against jihadism. But if the rise (or perhaps, “the scent”) of Donald Trump is symptomatic of a necrotic rot and general decline of a once great America, the responsibility for preserving Western civilisation against the very real threats which menace it will increasingly fall into the hands of smaller powers – Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, Denmark, even New Zealand.

Everyone knows the UN is broken but other multilateral institutions, like the International Criminal Court, can be leveraged and incorporated into the defence policies of small powers. We now have an international legal instrument to prosecute our enemies (war criminals all of them) – what need is there to have the Americans lock them up in Guantanamo? We now have a refuse station to deposit the trash – so why not bring Ahmad Al-Mahdi and “Caliph” Al-Baghdadi and Abubakr Shekau (and Joseph Kony, for that matter), kicking and screaming to the Hague where we can handcuff them in their underpants to the handrails outside.

There’s some argument to be made that local judiciaries function as better truth and reconciliation mechanisms than bureaucrat-heavy global courts – but what better proof can we provide to Muslim victims of suffering that we are on their side then by dressing-down the jihadists of the world before the international press? (2017 update: we might also dress down the Rohingya-killing Aung San Suu Kyi’s of the world, too).

In all likelihood, small powers will be crucial in the next phase of this war even if an examination of recent history shows that the foreign policy decisions of countries like Australia are symptomatic of a delusion where a small power thinks itself a great power. We are the truck drivers and logisticians for America’s theme park in Iraq’s Emerald City. We supplement our big cousin’s Air Force with a few extra fighter jets (which we buy off him for exorbitant prices). Secretly however, we all know that a country like Australia (with a population of 20 million) or Canada (whose landmass is largely a frozen waste) will never be able to join the global superpower club.

And really, we don’t want this anyway. We don’t want to conquer Afghanistan and install a glorious empire which will last a thousand years. We don’t want to occupy Iraq and raze all the mosques and make barbecues and the production of maple syrup mandatory. In principle (and I stress “in principle”), our main interest is in self-defence while peace-keeping and atrocity-prevention is also a shared goal. We are really just pre-emptive isolationists. For all intents and purposes, the “pre-emptive” component of this outlook involves surgically removing the little cancers in the world which are threatening to spread. In order that these cancers will never bother us.

Jihadism is one such cancer. And as with any cancer, it can be treated early or treated too late. One can cut the polyp out with a scalpel or one can wait till it becomes carcinogenic. One can pre-empt the spread or one can wait until it spreads, choosing instead to confront the problem with a bag-full of toxic chemicals (hyper-conventional military force) which is just as likely to destroy the rest of the body as it is to force the body into remission.

So how to cut out the cancer? Here’s a blueprint.

The Blueprint

A few years ago, a popular model was put forward to describe why complex adaptive systems like terrorist networks are so difficult to destroy – a model which juxtaposed decentralised systems with other systems whose command is centrally-controlled. The metaphor used was “the starfish and the spider”.

A spider, as we know, is reasonably easy to kill. Crush its invertebrate body between your fingertips and all its legs – its subsidiary parts – will cease to function. The hierarchical institutions of nation-states often look like spiders. Kill the mad king, his knights surrender. Or, in the world of today, if a drone is ready to be fired and the President is in a meeting the whole operation comes to a standstill because the chain of command is temporarily paralysed.

The starfish however, doesn’t need centralised command and control (C2). There is no singular brain running the show but a series of nerves running along the ambulacral surface of each individual arm. If any individual arm is cut off the arm regenerates. Each arm is, in effect, autonomous – decentralised.

A starfish regenerating an arm

Unlike with the spider, there is not one nerve centre to destroy but many waiting to grow back. And the biological analogy holds true to reality – organisations like Al-Qaeda and the “lone wolf” cells operating at the periphery of the Islamic State are demonstrative of the starfish model.

To unpack this further there are other congruent examples we could take from Greek myth – eg: if we were to contrast the regenerative heads of the Lernean Hydra with the single-minded Delphic Python (the classic mythological serpent – “cut off the head and the body dies”). There’s plenty of images to thickly-describe this phenomenon.

Guess who the terrorists are in this picture.

With this model in mind our task is thence to figure out ways in which to kill these “starfish” given that our current strategy (the drone-strike lottery) is having a limited net effect on the battlespace. As stated earlier, the fundamental problem with our approach to this conflict, has been our inability to understand the taxonomy, the anatomy and the reproductive capacity (that is, the nature) of the starfish – so, in many ways, the problem comes down to a problem of information and intelligence collection.

The nature of the information-space today is different to what it was during the Cold War. This is because unlike during the Cold War (when information was scarcely-available and jealously-guarded by those who held it) today’s “globalised” world is defined by what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “trajectories of disjuncture”. Information is no longer hidden, here and there, it is everywhere, available to everyone. It is no longer the purview of spies in the employ of the government. It is ripe for the picking by anyone – journalists, lobbyists, soldiers with blogs, hobbyists surfing the internet. Small Wars Journal, after all, is run part-time by a retired Marine out the back of his food truck. Much of the information (but not all) is already out there, at one’s fingertip, waiting to be apprehended.

Traditional intelligence organisations still fulfill a set of vital and specific functions. They collect high-level information which circulates through diplomatic circles; they analyse specific sets of information as it pertains directly to government policy; and, crucially, they deliver advice to policy-makers. But the world is far too big, the desertscapes and mountain ranges where jihadism is metastasizing are far too expansive for a bevy of urbane and taciturn bureaucrats to apprehend the nature of the problem as it appears on the ground. There is simply not enough paper in the Amazon to write all the risk assessment summaries.

Michael Nagata, the Japanese-American general who was until recently the head of the US Army’s program to fund Syria’s rebels, argued that in the fight against jihadism it will “take a network to defeat a network”. Following this logic then, the government (a centrally-controlled spider) is going to need help from the outside. This is where the private sector will likely be of some use.

Unlike a modern nation-state, there is no inevitable form which an entity in the private sector need adopt. Businesses like eBay have made billions by wresting control from central authority figures and placing it in the hands of the masses – by becoming thriving profitable starfish. Others, like Apple, have come to symbolise innovation in transcendental ways.

In general, and for good reason, there is a healthy suspicion of handing any kind of role in the War on Terror to the private sector. Indeed, apart from the problem of accountability there is a similar suspicion (if not a lack of trust) of the motivations of those in the business world. Just look at the controversies surrounding the free-reign that private military corporations like Blackwater have had over diplomatic security in Iraq. On this point, Machiavelli said “the lion”‘s share of what needed to be said about the problems posed by mercenaries in his writings on the condottieri in 16th century Italy.

In some cases however, specific and limited outsourcing of government war-time tasks to the private sector might be indispensable rather than inimical. Contractors are profit-minded which means, if they are paid according to outcomes, increased efficiency in the use of time and resources. Consider, as a heuristic comparison, the time it might take an individual military contractor to board a plane to the UAE and take up a job training Arab forces (as many retired Western soldiers have done) versus the time it might take an Australian military unit, even a special forces unit, to do the same. There’s almost no comparison.

The main problem with outsourcing, of course, will always be the issue of accountability. But insofar as the government holds the purse strings the private sector will always be behind to its pay-masters. Ultimately, contracts can be written how governments want. And laws still apply to individuals. Furthermore, with a degree of separation between the public and private sectors comes an additional, and useful element of deniability for the government. A condottiere does not carry a government ID card – therefore the government cannot be burned at the stake for the condottiere‘s shortcomings.

The condottieri, the gentlemen-mercenaries of Italy

Ultimately then, given what has been discussed about our cultural knowledge-gap and given the future role which smaller, devolved, government-affiliated but private entities might play, one could conclude that our order of battle (particularly in the sphere of information-gathering and intelligence-collection) needs a complete restructure. And it starts, of course, with government itself.

The current force pitted again jihadism behaves much like “the spider” – where a single-minded body controls eight independent and often knock-kneed arms (*cough* Sovereign Borders). But as the war evolves, it is increasingly clear that what is required to asphyxiate jihadism, once and for all, is an organism that more closely resembles a jellyfish.

To biologists, jellyfish are known as medusae, named for the chthonic snake-haired monster from Greek mythology. A medusa typically takes the form of an umbrella. In this metaphor, the upper surface (the exumbrella) is the figurehead of governance (an influencer but not necessarily a decider of the mundane and everyday) which encompasses everything. The exumbrella is in turn supported by a pulsating hydroskeleton (a more efficient, flexible bureaucracy) and a tangle of toxin-delivering stingers (the military, especially the special forces).

The key distinguishing feature between the jellyfish and its older arachnid self is obnoxiousness ofpresence. While the spider is intrusive – a blot in one’s surroundings, a menace, something to be feared – the jellyfish is confidential, cordial almost, barely noticed as it pulsates seamlessly through the environment. In battle, however, a medusa is just as lethal as the spider. The semi-transparent Australian Irukanji, the smallest of the box jellyfish, is also the most deadly of the box jellyfish, despite being the size of a fingernail.

Again, and crucially, the jellyfish is not intrusive – it does not meddle, disrespectfully and contumeliously, in the same way that the spider does. Jellyfish do not hide behind the fortress walls of the Camp Russell’s of the world (see SOTG-Afghanistan), hunkering down in a maze of HESCO, browbeating those caught in its web about the virtues of democracy. Jellyfish simply “bloom” – reproducing seasonally and in large numbers when the sunshine increases – in a way which, crucially, never disrupts the ecosystem.

Instead of hiding and occasionally killing – like stonefish consuming bottom-feeders on the seabed – they replicate. The focus is not on opportunistic consumption but ally-creation

Still though, the bloom hunts. And there is yet prey to hunted.

So, the bloom goes forward. And swimming with, amongst and at the vanguard of this bloom will be other carnivorous hydrozoa – sworn into the service of the medusan public but privately employed – at an arm’s length. Hydrozoa like the Portuguese Man o’ War. The Man o’ War distinguishes itself from the bloom jellyfish in that it is not one organism comprised of many cells but a colonialorganismmade of many individual organisms called “zooids”.

The fleet moves

In principle, the privately-contracted Man o’ War is independent from the bloom and this independence can be useful to the bloom. The Man o’ War remains accountable to the bloom, who feed it the bloom’s scraps, but it complements the bloom because its structure – with its many “zooids” – is different to the bloom. These zooids can produce themselves at random through a process called “direct fission” – redeploying copies of themselves instantaneously.

As the bloom and the Man o’ War approach the juvenile starfish, teams of these zooids break away and descend upon the prey. The zooids attach themselves to the prey’s exterior – problematising the nature of the prey, fissioning further to create more zooids – “local” zooids – who can map the prey’s centre of gravity, assisting with the uncreation of the prey by thickly describing the prey. The zooids prepare the battlespace for the rest of the bloom by showing the bloom where the prey’s weaknesses are; what the prey subsists off; contextualising the prey as the right prey within an entire seabed of prey in a way which complements the inputs gathered by the bloom’s sensory organs – the bloom’s spooky spy-feelers.

A zooid. Microscopic. Deadly.

Having colonised the prey’s crusty back, the zooids weigh the prey down and the prey is consumed by the bloom. Then, the bloom moves on, in search of more prey, with the auxiliary zooids swimming in front, disappearing silently into the deep.

This is the blueprint for the slow asphyxiation of jihadism and one need get behind it, before the chronology overtakes us. It does, of course, require money. Or more precisely, the reallocation of money away from direct-action, droney-droney, pointy-shooty measures.

Applying Mattis’ logic, if Western governments with vested interests in the problem of terrorism don’t properly fund ground-based, human-conducted research which seeks to grapple with the problem in the places where it is metastasizing then those same governments are going to need greater funding for missile research. In any given location, by the time the jihadist problem requires a military intervention, then it is too late.

The key to “defeating jihad” is a re-structuring of the intelligence sector and in part a devolution of certain functions to the private sector (getting behind the mercenary zooids) to assist with collecting more information about the problem. A knowledge gap persists. And we need to fill it.

Take the rise of jihadism in Mali for example. Jihadism has been spreading, and rapidly so, over the last two years. Right now, of course, everyone is paying attention to ISIS – because ISIS is in vogue. ISIS are the badass bandidos with all the fancy videos and media attention. But while Iraq and Syria are now firmly in the clutches of jihadism, a new group – theForce de libération du Macina (FLM) – is growing in central Mali. Before, jihadism was just a problem in the far north of Mali, a fad amongst a few Arab traders and disaffected nomadic Tuareg. Now, for the first time, FLM is targeting settled Fulani in Mali proper, wooing them to jihadism with nostalgic dreams of long-since forgotten caliphates. This is where the zooids will prove indispensable. Send in the zooids. Let them find out what’s happening in the Sahara. Indeed, what is happening in Fulani Mali? What is the problem? Why is the cancer spreading?